After the optimism following the fall of the Berlin Wall the world has seen more of a
democratic backlash. But despite the backlashes in some societies the stability of democracy
does not seem to be threatened. Why is this so? One common answer points to civic culture a
shared feeling of responsibility for the common fate of citizens. An alternative to be
explored in this volume is that the stability of democratic rule is anchored in its
integration in the large set of social institutions with both direct and indirect relationship
to politics. These are linked to give input to and are affected by democratic processes. Where
these relations are ubiquitous and strong democracy is stable. At the same time institutions
are slowly but constantly changing. Hence in order to understand changes in the functioning of
democracy at the level of the state it is necessary to explore the changes in surrounding
institutions and the way they shape a democratic society.The empirical focus of the book is
institutional change in the Nordic model with special emphasis on Norway. There are many
reasons to pay closer attention to the Nordic and Norwegian case when it comes to analyses of
changes in the functioning of democracy. On a par with the other Scandinavian countries Norway
is in the forefront in the world in the quality of democratic governance as well as social
trust and quality of life. As an extreme case the most corporatist society within the family
of the Nordic Model Norwegian society offers an opportunity both for intriguing case studies
and for challenging and refining existing theory on processes of institutional change.From a
theoretical perspective this invites reflections which to some extent are at odds with the
dominant conceptions of institutional change. Neither models of path dependency nor models of
aggregate incremental change focus on the continuous social bargaining over institutional
change. Despite recent processes of differentiation and liberalization common to the Western
world as a whole corporatism implies a close connection between state economy public sphere
cultural life and knowledge production. This also means that institutions are intimately
bundled in a stronger subtler and more wide-reaching way than typically assumed in the
literature on varieties of capitalism.The volume draws on but transcends two prominent
theoretical strands: the civil society perspective (a locus classicus being Cohen and Arato
1992) and the more recent work on well-functioning civil service as a precondition for good
governance (Rothstein 2011) pointing out the road to Denmark (Fukuyama 2014). By embracing
more social fields than these two approaches the institutional approach opens a broader space
for democratic reflection. Moreover institutional-historical case studies situated within
Nordic societies as a specific social structural framework demonstrate the diversity of links
between democracy and social life outside of politics in a narrow sense such as:- Policies of
citizenship as a limitation to democracy- Democracy in working life- Democracy and policies of
gender relations- Expertise and democratic governance- Social elites - a threat to democracy?-
Welfare state institutions as core elements in modern democracy- Institutional perspectives on
the emergence of capitalism and democracy A detailed outline of contents and contributors is
attached. The book rests on and further develops the former two volumes on institutional
change. The first volume is centered on corporatist institutions with emphasis on negotiations
by civil society actors in interplay with the state. Concentrated on the public sphere the
second volume sought to locate processes of social deliberation within the contexts of a public
sphere that embraces not only the media but also fields such as voluntary associations the
arts and religion. This third volume synthesizes these contributions by bringing them
explicitl
